These are not good times for Disney or the Metaverse, an ambitious project that led Facebook to change its name to Meta. We’ve said it here from the beginning, the Metaverse project was in many ways as dazzling as it was complex. The appeal of approaches like the one popularized by Ready Player One or, if we go to the origin of the term, Neal Stephenson in the fast-paced Snow Crash, is technologically a chimera today, as Intel suggested at the end of 2021.

We were promised, as I said, a Ready Player One-like experience, but a year later there was really only a few basic design avatars on the table, which resembled the defunct Nintendo Wiiand a handful of apps and spaces that were nowhere near as vibrant as Second Life in its heyday, but defined by Meta herself in an internal memo as «a sad and empty place«. A few days later, such a bold (and empty) bet dealt a severe blow to the company’s accounts.

Disney, for its part, does one of the companies that decided to bet on Metaverse, creating a task force that had to explore the possibilities of Metaverse and, of course, find out how its extensive catalog fits in the aforementioned space. And I go back, it would be something spectacular if the Metaverse was what we were promised. Being able to pretend to have a lightsaber, travel through space to the beat of Awesome Mixtape, or don a Tony Stark suit, these are experiences that, albeit virtual, would be sensational. If possible, sure.

Any resemblance to the Metaverse that Meta and current reality wanted to sell us is pure coincidence or rather a figment of our imaginations, and more and more companies have had to assume this painful (for their accounts) reality. So as we can read in The Wall Street Journal, Disney scrapped its plans in the Metaverse and fired the entire division that you created to work on this project.

As we told you in early February, Disney announced layoffs due to a decline in Disney+ subscribers along with poor global economic forecasts. In bad times, big companies don’t hesitate for a minute to pull out the scissors and start cutting. However, the fact that this movement occurred before more far-reaching movements in this regard began, it points to the little trust there should be in society regarding the Metaverse.